When Christakos Meets His Match

This was the kind of desire he’d missed for so long.

Urgent and hot. Utterly compelling. As if he couldn’t envisage getting off this plane and not taking Sidonie with him so that he could taste her all over.

‘Er … excuse me, Mr Christakos?’

He looked up and there she was. Just like that any semblance of clear-headedness was gone and he was reduced to animal lust again. He had to get up and let her back in, cursing his body which would not obey his head.

One thing he was sure of as she brushed past him in the small space and her scent tantalised him: he wanted this Sidonie Fitzgerald with a hunger he’d not known before. And he would have her. Because Alexio Christakos always got what he wanted.

BLOOD BROTHERS

Power and passion run in their veins

Rafaele and Alexio have learned that to feel emotion is to be weak. Calculated ruthlessness brings them immense success in the boardroom and in the bedroom. But a storm is coming with the sudden appearance of a long-lost half-brother, Cesar, and three women who will change their lives for ever …

Read Rafaele Falcone’s story in:

WHEN FALCONE’S WORLD STOPS TURNING

February 2014

Only one woman has come close to touching this brooding Italian’s cold heart, and he intends to have her once more. But Samantha Rourke has a secret that will rock his world in a very different way …

Read Alexio Christakos’s story in:

WHEN CHRISTAKOS MEETS HIS MATCH

April 2014

His legendary Greek charm can get him any woman he wants—and he wants Sidonie Fitzgerald for one, hot night. But when that night isn’t enough will he regret breaking his own rules?

And read Cesar Da Silva’s story in:

WHEN DA SILVA BREAKS THE RULES

June 2014

The prodigal son is tormented by his dark past.

Can one woman save this Spanish billionaire’s tortured soul, or is he beyond redemption?

When Christakos Meets His Match

Abby Green

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABBY GREEN spent her teens reading Mills and Boon® romances. After repeatedly deferring a degree to study Social Anthropology (long story …) she ended up working for many years in the film and TV Industry as an assistant director.

One day, while standing outside an actor’s trailer, waiting for him to emerge, in the rain, holding an umbrella in gale force winds, she thought to herself, Surely there’s more than this—and it involves being inside and dry?

Thinking of her love for Mills and Boon, and encouraged by a friend, Abby decided to submit a partial manuscript. After numerous rewrites, chucking out the original idea and starting again with a new story, her first book was accepted and an author was born.

She is happy to report that days of standing in the rain outside an actor’s trailer are a rare occurrence now. She loves creating stories that will put you through an emotional wringer (in a good way, hopefully), yet leave you feeling satisfied and uplifted.

She lives in Dublin, Ireland, and you can find out more about her and her books here: www.abby-green.com

I’d like to dedicate this book to all the fabulous Harlequin Mills and Boon readers and fans who make my job so much easier, especially on the days when the task can seem impossible!

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EXTRACT

PROLOGUE

ALEXIO CHRISTAKOS HAD always known his mother had had affairs all through her marriage to his father. He just hadn’t expected to see such a public display of it at her funeral. Her coffin was strewn with lone flowers and there were displays of wet eyes from a handful of men he’d never met before in his life.

His father had stomped away with a glower on his face a short while before. He couldn’t exactly claim the moral high ground as he too had had numerous affairs.

It had been a constant war of attrition between them. His father always seeking to make his mother as jealous as he felt. And she...? Alexio had the feeling that nothing would have ever made her truly happy, even though she had lived her life in the lap of luxury, surrounded by people to cater to her every whim.

She’d had a sadness, a deep melancholy about her, and they’d never been emotionally close. A vivid memory assailed him at that moment—a memory he hadn’t allowed to surface for a long time. He’d been about nine, and his throat had ached with the effort it had taken not to cry. He’d just witnessed his parents having a bitter row.

His mother had caught him standing behind the door and he’d blurted out, ‘Why do you hate each other so much? Why can’t you be in love like you’re supposed to be?’

She’d looked at him coldly and the lack of emotion in her eyes had made him shiver. She’d bent down to his level and taken his chin in her hand. ‘Love’s a fairytale, Alexio, and it doesn’t exist. Remember this: I married your father because he could give me what I needed. That’s what is important. Success. Security. Power. Don’t ever concern yourself with emotions. They make you weak. Especially love.’

Alexio would never forget the excoriating feeling of exposure and shame in that moment...

He felt a hand on his shoulder then and looked to his older half-brother, Rafaele, who stood beside him and smiled tightly. They’d always shared the same conflicted relationship with their mother. Rafaele’s Italian father had gone to pieces after their mother had walked out on him when he had lost his entire fortune—an unpalatable reminder of their mother’s ruthless nature so soon after that disturbing childhood memory of his own.

For years Alexio and his brother had communicated with habitual boyish rough-housing and rivalry, but since Rafaele had left home to make his way when Alexio had been about fourteen their relationship had become less fractious. Even if Alexio had never quite been able to let go of his envy that Rafaele hadn’t had to endure the almost suffocating attention he’d received from his father. The heavy weight of expectation. The disappointment when Alexio had been determined to prove himself and not accept his inheritance.

They turned to walk away from the grave, engrossed in their own thoughts. They were of a similar build and height, both a few inches over six feet, drop-dead gorgeous, dark-haired. Alexio’s hair was darker, cut close to his skull. Their mother had bequeathed to them both her distinctive green eyes, but Alexio’s were lighter—more golden.

When they came to a stop near the cars Alexio decided to rib his brother gently, seeking to assuage the suddenly bleak feeling inside him. He observed his brother’s stubbled jaw. ‘You couldn’t even clean up for the funeral?’

‘I got out of bed too late,’ Rafaele drawled with a glint in his eye.

Alexio smiled wryly. ‘Unbelievable. You’ve only been in Athens for two days—no wonder you wanted to stay at a hotel and not at my apartment...’

Rafaele was about to respond when Alexio saw his face close up and his eyes narrow on something or someone behind him. He turned to look too and saw a tall, stern-faced stranger staring at them from a few feet away. Something struck him in the gut: recognition. Crazy. But the man’s eyes were a distinctive green...and that gut feeling intensified.

The stranger flicked a glance at the grave behind them and then his lip curled. ‘Are there any more of us?’

Alexio bristled at his belligerent tone and frowned, ‘Us? What are you talking about?’

The man just looked at Rafaele. ‘You don’t remember, do you?’

Alexio saw Rafaele go pale. Hoarsely he asked, ‘Who are you?’

The man smiled, but it was cold, ‘I’m your older brother—half-brother. My name is Cesar da Silva. I came today to pay my respects to the woman who gave me life...not that she deserved it.’

He was still talking but a roaring was sounding in Alexio’s ears. Older half-brother? Cesar da Silva. He’d heard of the man. Who hadn’t? He was the owner of a vast global conglomerate encompassing real estate, finance—myriad businesses. Famously private and reclusive.

Something rose up inside Alexio and he issued an abrupt, ‘What the hell?’

The man looked at him coldly and Alexio could now see the fraternal similarities that had led to that prickle of awareness. Even though da Silva was dark blond in colouring, they could be non-identical triplets.

Da Silva was saying coldly, ‘Three brothers by three fathers...and yet she didn’t abandon either of you to the wolves.’

He stepped forward and Alexio immediately stepped up too, feeling rage building inside him in the face of this shocking revelation. His half-brother topped him only by an inch at most. They stood chest to chest.

Cesar gritted out, ‘I didn’t come here to fight you, brother. I have no issue with either of you.’

A fierce well of protectiveness that Alexio had felt once before for his mother, before she’d rejected it, rose up within him. ‘Only with our dead mother—if what you say is true.’

Cesar smiled, but it was bleak, and it threw Alexio off slightly, making the rage diminish.

‘Oh, it’s true—more’s the pity.’

He stepped around him then and Alexio and Rafaele turned to watch him walk to the open grave, where he stood for a few long moments before taking something from his pocket and throwing it into the black space, where it landed with a dull thud.

Eventually he turned and came back. After a long, silent but charged moment, during which he looked at both brothers, he turned and walked swiftly to a waiting car. He got into the back. It drove off smoothly.

Rafaele turned towards Alexio and looked at him. Gobsmacked. Shock reverberated through his body. Adrenalin made him feel keyed up.

‘What the...?’

Rafaele just shook his head. ‘I don’t know...’

Alexio looked back at the empty space where the car had been and something cold settled into his belly. He felt exposed, remembering that time when he’d thought his mother would allow him to protect her. She hadn’t. Ever elusive, she was now managing to reach out from beyond the grave and demonstrate with dramatic timing just how a woman couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth and reveal her secrets. She would always hold something back. Something that might have the power to shatter your world.

CHAPTER ONE

Five months later...

‘CARA...DO YOU have to leave so soon?’

The voice oozed sultry sex appeal. Alexio stalled for a second in the act of buttoning up his shirt—not because he was tempted to stay but because, if anything, he felt even more eager to leave.

He schooled his features and turned to face the woman in the bed. She was all honeyed limbs and artfully tumbled glossy brown hair. Huge dark eyes, a pouting mouth and the absence of a sheet were doing little to help Alexio forget why he’d chosen to take her to his hotel suite in Milan after his brother Rafaele’s wedding reception last night.

She was stunning. Perfect.

Even so, he felt no resurgence of desire. And Alexio didn’t like to acknowledge the fact that the sex had been wholly underwhelming. On the surface it had been fine; but on some deeper level it had left him cold. He switched on the charm he was famed for, though, and smiled.

‘Sorry, bellissima, I have to fly to Paris this morning for work.’

The woman, whose name he all of a sudden wasn’t entirely sure of—Carmela?—leant back and stretched seductively, displaying her perfectly cosmetically enhanced naked breasts to their best advantage, and pouted even more. ‘You have to leave right now?’

Alexio kept his smile in place and when he’d finished dressing bent down and pressed a light kiss to her mouth, escaping before she could twine her arms around his neck. Claustrophobia was rising within him.

‘We had fun, cara...I’ll call you.’

Now the seductive pout was gone, and the woman’s real nature shone through as her eyes turned hard. She knew when she was being blown off and clearly did not like it when the man in question was as sought-after as Alexio Christakos.

She stood up from the bed naked and flounced off to the bathroom, issuing a stream of Italian petulance. Alexio winced slightly but let out a sigh of relief as soon as she’d disappeared behind a slamming door.

He shook his head as he made his way out of the suite and towards the lobby of the plush hotel in the private lift reserved for VIP guests. Women. He loved them, but he loved them at a distance. In his bed when it suited him and then out of it for as long as he cared to indulge them—which invariably wasn’t for long.

After years of witnessing his mother’s cold behaviour towards his father, who had remained in slavish thrall to her beauty and eternal elusiveness, Alexio had developed a very keen sense of self-protection around women. He could handle cold and aloof because he was used to that, and he preferred it.

His father, thwarted by his emotionally unavailable wife, had turned to his son, making him the centre of his world. It had been too much. From an early age Alexio had chafed against the claustrophobia of his father’s over-attention. And now when anyone—especially a woman—became even remotely over-emotional, or expected too much, he shut down inside.

Brief encounters were his forté. Witnessing his half-brother’s wedding the day before had inevitably brought up questions of his own destiny, but Alexio, at the age of thirty, felt no compelling need to settle down yet.

He did envisage a wife and family at some stage...far in the future. When the time came his wife would be perfect. Beautiful, accommodating. Undemanding of Alexio’s emotions. Above all, Alexio would not fall into the same trap as his father: tortured for life because he’d coveted a woman who didn’t covet him. He’d been disabused at an early age of the notion that love might be involved.

He thought of his older brother turning up at his mother’s funeral and all the accompanying unwelcome emotions he’d felt that day: shock, anger, hurt, betrayal.

Used to blocking out emotions, Alexio had relegated the incident to the back of his mind. He hadn’t sought Cesar da Silva out, hadn’t mentioned it again to Rafaele—even though he knew Rafaele had invited their half-brother to his wedding. Predictably enough, after that first and last terse meeting, he hadn’t turned up.

Emotions were messy, unpredictable. They tripped you up. Look at Rafaele! His life had just been turned upside down by a woman who had kept his son from him for four years. And yet two months after meeting her again he was getting married, looking foolishly in love and blithely forgetting the lessons his own father had taught him about the fickle nature of women.

As far as Alexio was concerned—even if Rafaele appeared to be happily embarking on wedded bliss, and no matter how cute his three-and-a-half-year-old nephew was—his brother had been played for a fool by his new wife. Why wouldn’t she now want to marry Rafaele Falcone, wunderkind of the worldwide automobile industry, with an estimated wealth running into the billions? Especially if she had a son to support?

No, Alexio was steering well clear of similar scenarios and he would never allow himself to be caught as his brother had been. He would never forgive a woman who kept a child from him. Still, a sliver of unease went down his spine. His brother, whom he’d considered to share a similar philosophy, had managed to get caught...

Alexio’s mouth firmed and he pushed such rogue notions down deep. He put on a pair of shades as his driver brought the car around to the front entrance and was oblivious to the double-take stares of a group of women as they walked into the hotel.

As soon as the car pulled away Alexio was already focusing on the next thing on his agenda, the introspection his brother’s wedding had precipitated along with his recent unsatisfactory bed partner already relegated to the back of his mind.

* * *

Sidonie Fitzgerald buckled her seatbelt on the plane and took a deep breath. But she was unable to shift the ball of tension sitting in her belly. For once her habitual fear of flying was being eclipsed by something else, and Sidonie couldn’t even really enjoy that fact.

All she could see in her mind’s eye was her beloved Tante Josephine’s round, eternally childish and worried face and hear her quavering voice: ‘Sidonie, what does it mean? Will they take my home from me? All these bills...where did they come from?’

Sidonie’s aunt was fifty-four and had spent a lifetime locked in a world of innocence. She’d been deprived of oxygen as a baby and as a result had been mildly brain-damaged. She’d always functioned at a slightly lesser and slower level than everyone around her, but had managed to get through school and find a job. She still worked in the grocer’s shop around the corner from where she’d lived for years, giving her precious independence.

Sidonie pursed her lips. She had loved her self-absorbed and endlessly vain mother, who had passed away only a couple of months before, but how could her mother have done this to her sweet and innocent younger sister?

The never forgotten sting of shame reminded Sidonie all too uncomfortably of exactly how her mother could have done such a thing—as if she could ever really forget. Ruthlessly she quashed it.

When Sidonie’s father had died a few years before, their comfortable lives had crashed around their ears, leaving them with nothing. Sidonie had been forced to leave her university degree before the start of her final year in order to find work and save money to go back.

Moving to Paris to live with Tante Josephine had been her mother Cecile’s only option to avoid becoming homeless or—even worse—having to find work. Cecile had not been happy. She’d been used to a life of comfort, relative luxury and security, courtesy of her hard-working husband who had wanted nothing more than to make his wife happy.

It would appear now, though, as if Sidonie’s mother’s selfish ways had risen to the fore again. She’d encouraged her sister to take out a mortgage on the apartment that had been bought and paid for by her husband because he’d cared for his vulnerable sister-in-law’s welfare. Cecile had used this fact as leverage to persuade Tante Josephine to agree to the remortgage. She’d then used that money, and credit cards in both their names, to spend a small fortune. Tante Josephine now found herself liable for the astronomical bills as the remaining living account-holder.

Sidonie had to figure out the best way forward to help her aunt—she had no intention of leaving her to fend for herself. The start of the process had been taking on the burden of the debts into her own name. She hadn’t thought twice about doing it—ever since her childhood innocence had been ripped away Sidonie had developed a well-ingrained instinct to cover up for her mother—even now, when she was gone.

Sidonie was facing the prospect of moving to Paris to help her aunt get out of this crisis. She staved off the sense of panic. She was young and healthy. Surely she could get work? Even if it was menial?

In a sick way events had conspired to help her—she’d lost her waitressing job in Dublin just before she’d left for Paris to meet with a solicitor to discuss her aunt’s situation. Her restaurant boss had explained miserably that they had gone into liquidation, like so many others. Sidonie was going back to Dublin now—just to tie up loose ends and collect the deposit owed to her on her flat when she moved out.

Her hands clenched into fists at the thought of how her mother had only ever thought about herself, oblivious to the repercussions of her—

‘Here is your seat, sir.’

‘Thank you.’

Sidonie’s thoughts scattered as she heard the exchange above her head, and she looked up and saw a man. She blinked. And blinked again. He was very tall and broad. Slim hips at her eye level. He was taking off an overcoat and folding it up to place it in the overheard locker, revealing a lean, muscular build under a fine silk shirt and jacket. Sidonie was vaguely aware of the way the air hostess was hovering attentively.

The man said in English, with a seductive foreign accent, ‘I’ve got it, thank you.’

The air hostess looked comically deflated and turned away. The man was now taking off his suit jacket, and Sidonie realised she was staring—no better than the gaping air hostess. Quickly she averted her head and looked out of the window, seeing nothing of the pewter-grey Parisian spring skies and the fluorescent-jacket-clad ground staff preparing the plane for take-off.

His image was burned onto her brain. It didn’t help when she felt him take the seat beside her and all the air around them seemed to disappear. And it really didn’t help when his scent teased her nostrils; musky and masculine.

He was quite simply the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life. Dark olive complexion, high cheekbones, strong jaw. Short dark brown hair. Firmly sculpted masculine mouth. He should have been pretty. But Sidonie’s impression was not of pretty. It was of hard and uncompromising sexuality. Heat. The last kind of person she’d have expected to sit in an economy seat beside her.

And then he spoke. ‘Excuse me.’

His voice was so deep that she felt it reverberate in the pit of her belly. She swallowed and told herself she was being ridiculous—he couldn’t possibly be that gorgeous. She turned her head and her heart stopped. His face was inches away. He was...that gorgeous. And more. He looked vaguely familiar and she wondered if he was a famous male model. Or a French movie star?

Something funny was happening to Sidonie’s brain and body. They didn’t seem to be connected any more. She felt a hysterical giggle rise up and had to stifle it. She didn’t giggle. What was wrong with her?

One dark brow moved upwards over the most startling pair of green eyes she’d ever seen. Gold and green. Like a lion. She had green eyes too, but they were more blue than green.

‘I think you’re sitting on my seatbelt?’

It took a few seconds for the words to compute, and when they did Sidonie jumped up as if scalded, hands flapping. ‘I’m so sorry... Excuse me... Just let me... It must be here somewhere...’

Sounding irritated, the man said, ‘Stay still and I’ll get it.’

Sidonie closed her eyes in mortification, her hands gripping the seat-back in front of her, and she hovered, contorted in the small space, as the man coolly retrieved his seatbelt and buckled it.

Sidonie sat down again and attended to her own belt. Feeling breathless, and avoiding looking at him again, she said, ‘I’m sorry. I—’

He cut her off. ‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it.’

A flare of something hot lanced Sidonie’s belly. Did he have to sound so curt? And why was she suddenly so aware of the fact that her hair was scraped up into a messy bun, that she had no make-up on, that she was wearing jeans that were so worn there was a frayed hole at her knee and an equally worn university sweatshirt. And her glasses. If Central Casting had been looking for ‘messy grunge student type’ she would have been hired on the spot.